Carriers are facing a number of threats to their core business models. As part of their evolution, carriers have begun exploring ways of branching out from their core services (e.g., voice services, SMS, internet access, etc.) into new revenue generating business models including, for example, the deployment of visually rendered services. From a carrier's perspective, this trend, for example, has resulted in an increased focus on the roll out of rich web based applications that allow the carrier to be a participant of what is now a rapidly growing Web 2.0 ecosystem.
The term “Web 2.0” describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to, for example, enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and/or functionality of the web. Web 2.0 encapsulates the idea of the proliferation of interconnectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services, such as, for example, social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies. Although the term Web 2.0 suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.
Web portals allow, for example, partners, employees and/or customers to choose their user experience, with personalized applications based on role, context, actions, location, preferences and team collaboration needs. A portal server comprises web portal software and core portal services that, e.g., aggregate applications and content as role-based applications.
Portlets are pluggable user interface software components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page. Typically, following the desktop metaphor, a portal page is displayed as a collection of non-overlapping portlet windows, where each portlet window displays a portlet. Hence a portlet (or collection of portlets) resembles a web-based application that is hosted in a portal. A portlet container is the runtime environment for portlets using the Java® Specification Request (JSR) 168 Portlet Specification, in which portlets are, for example, instantiated, used and destroyed. (Java and all Java-based trademarks and logos are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both.) The JSR 168 Portlet application programming interface (API) provides standard interfaces for portlets. Portlets based on this JSR 168 Portlet Specification are referred to as standard portlets. Some examples of portlet applications are email, weather reports and discussion forums.
Portal based applications (or portlet applications) allow for web based applications to relatively easily provide personalization and customization features to subscribers so that, for example, content that is rendered by browsers is adapted as appropriate based on the preferences associated with a particular subscriber. Further, standards such as, for example, Java® Specification Request (JSR) 168, have allowed for portlet based infrastructures to become fairly widespread, allowing for the standards based development of standard portlets into standards-compliant portlet containers.
However, a number of challenges remain during the operational deployment of such a portal based solutions. For example, while achieving horizontal scalability is largely a function of adding capacity at multiple tiers, e.g., the HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) Server tier, the portal tier and/or the database tier (assuming that the database is horizontally scalable) the costs associated with scaling at each these tiers are not equivalent. Additionally, for example, multiple types of digital media (inclusive of content that is rich (e.g., music and video)) are now being rendered to subscribers, increasing the importance of operational efficiency in these domains.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.